The Garden of Stories: Family Ties and Telling Tales

My short story "Uncles" is currently up on the lively, irreverent online journal "Unlikely Stories," edited by Jonathan Penton. Although a fantasy, the story takes off from the penny ante poker games my family used to have in the back room of my parents' house on Long Island. 
          While the story is a fantasy, it's also a homage to an older generation of my family that is all gone now -- to the poker-playing men of that family at least. 
           The setting is the penny ante poker games that took place either before or after, or sometimes both, "dinner," whenever that meal took place, whether it was a holiday gathering, or just a family gathering with no particular theme or reason. When the gathering took place at 54 Downs Road in Hempstead, the suburban town on Long Island that my parents bought with the help of a postwar GI loan -- a government program. Yes, the federal government used to help ordinary families buy their own homes. What an idea. 
          What makes this experience special is that families, siblings, even extended families, often lived reasonably close to one another. That doesn't happen so routinely any more, and I was the first in my generation to break away. So I have no basis for complaint today that my children live in Pennsylvania and Ohio.
           But back in the time I am writing about, both my mother's and my father's siblings lived and raised families in suburban Nassau County towns. My mother's mother and her elder brother Mark lived together in Queens County in the house where my parents were also living when I was born. They had a longer drive to the family gatherings in Hempstead, but it wasn't terribly long siblings -- and, a further inducement, Mark was the prime mover in getting the poker games going. He would walk around restlessly shuffling a deck of cards. 
            "Sit down, Mark," my Uncle Eric would tell him, "you're making me nervous. We'll play later."
             And we always did. 
             If my father's brothers were attending the same family party, they were likely to play as well. 
              This was how I got to know my uncles, in so far as I did. 
              As mentioned above, I have fantasized some circumstances here, and imagined how each of my uncles seated around this fictional table might respond. 
               Please take a look at my story "Uncles."
               Here's the link  
https://www.unlikelystories.org/content/uncles  

The Garden of Verse: Verse-Virtual Back on Track

It's been a good first month in the year 2020. I'm speaking personally here, of course. What goes on nationally makes me weep, or rage, everyday. (End of subject; I promise.)
            The biggest blessing was the revival of the journal of the poetry community of which I am fortunate member, Verse-Virtual. Last fall Verse-Virtual's founder and editor Firestone Feinberg fell ill and could not continue to edit and produce the group's online journal, which has been publishing new issues every month for five years. That stream of publication ceased last October. Happily, Firestone is recovering and we look hopefully for his return.
             But in the meantime the members of the community recognized and acknowledged to one another that we were missing the frequent contact and communication that Verse-Virtual's journal stimulates and decided we needed to continue Firestone's work on an interim basis.
            Two of the publication's contributing editors stepped up and volunteered to do the editorial and production work to bring out a newon Jan. 1, 2020. We were fortunate to find in Jim Lewis someone who has the technical skills to create the necessary new web pages. And contributing editor Donna Hilbert volunteered to serve as guest editor, reading all the submissions and choosing the poems. 
            The only change is the while the journal's domain used to end with ".com," the new incarnation ends with ".org." 
            So all are invited to read the poems and other content at Verse-Virtual.org
              After saving the journal's archives by transferring all the material to the new domain, Jim had this to say about the history and make-up of the Verse-Virtual community in his editor's notes for the January issue:  
             "I learned a lot about this community and the people in it from reading random bio notes. A beautifully diverse group, but there's a strong commonality that is strikingly obvious when viewed "growing backwards". Passion and compassion are woven all through your poems. You are a group of people who experience life with intensity, and it shows in your writing."  

             So, I've been celebrating the revived Verse-Virtual all month (in addition to reading submissions for our next issue, in March). Here are some excerpts from a few of the many strong poems in the January issue:

Last year, trying to escape the cold—
we snuck off to the barn,
to hear the lowing of the animals.
But the dark with its mossy warmth
greeted us with another legend,
and the green holly man startled us
from his perch up in the rafters.
This night, we are cagey, fearless.
     [from "Visiting His Aunt, Christmas" by Laurie Bryo]


Unfold your fingers, if you can—
they are waiting to grow eloquent
and strong. They will move under mine
the first time you touch the watered silk
of an iris, or your mother’s face.
    [from Marilyn Taylor's "From a Dark Place"]

six newspapers
scattered across the porch
of my dead neighbor 
     [from "Five Haiku" by David Graham]


You wonder
that her near-
nakedness
means nothing,
that what light
can touch is
only surface,
that what you
can't enter
you can't be.
     [from "The Woman in an Imaginary Painting" by Tom Montag]



Occupied with my glass,
swirling and sipping the rough
country wine, I failed to observe
how green mountains slipped
behind the curtain of night
and how the river birch gleamed
a moment in the fading day.
      [from "Inattention" by Steve Klepetar]

He stepped out of the sea
at precisely 4 p.m.
He wore a dark suit,
and it didn’t appear to be wet.
Barefoot,
he ran his hands through his hair
and asked me what shore
he’d washed up on.
     [from "Shelley" by Kareen Tayyar] 


Where are the dead of the flood
who missed the ship
who lost their grip
who were not picked
to go below the rainbow’s arc?
Where are the dead of the flood
the ones who swam, the ones who float
in indigo waters beyond their depth,
beneath our vision, begrudged their breath—
      [from "Noah's Arc" by Betsy Mars] 


The parties have ended.
Confetti has been swept up and thrown away.
Headaches have disappeared.
And maybe that’s why I’ve always preferred
the second day of the year.
Because it’s ordinary, unassuming.
The streets are quiet.
Stores are open.
There are no parades or football games.
You can walk without feeling lonely. 
     [from "The Second Day of the Year" by Clint Margrave]

I tumble into the chair, while Arik,
born and raised in Soviet, and stoic as Putin
set to interrogate yet another poet,
unfurls the cape over my head
and makes me feel what it’s like to disappear. 
[from "The Kremlin Barber Shop" by Alan Walowitz]


You can read the rest of these poems, and find many more like them at 
http://www.verse-virtual.org/poems-and-articles.html
     





 



ne,

Plymouth Poet Laureate Finalists Poetry Reading at the Plymouth Public Library

I'll be reading poetry Thursday evening (Feb. 20) as one of four finalists for the position of Plymouth Poet Laureate at Plymouth Public Library. 
The four finalists for the newly created post of Poet Laureate will be reading our poetry and making some poetic fuss over Plymouth and its 400th anniversary celebration. The event takes places at 7 p.m. and there's a "meet the finalists" pre-game reception beginning at 6 p.m.

To come for the reception enter through the library's side door, starting at 6 p.m. The reception offers hors d'oeuvres by Mallebar Braisseries and a cash bar. 

Each poet has 15 minutes to read, following an introduction. I am planning to squeeze in four poems: "The Long Descent," a nature and place poem, recently published by The American Journal of Poetry. "One Sky," an apocalyptic climate disaster rant; followed by "My Dad's Ship But One of Three," an old favorite about father's World War II brush with disaster. And, finally, my new 'Plymouth poem,' titled "A Shining Village By the Shore."

The other finalists who will be reading are Stephan Delbos, Miriam O'Neal, and Tzynya Pinchback. 

Please come, if you can. If not wish me luck.   

 

The Garden of Verse: "Seasons Impeaching!" ... "First the Knitting, Then the Guillotine"

Three years after misled voters, Russian bots, a nationwide scheme by the Republican Party to suppress voting and disenfranchise Black and other minority voters, and the manipulations of the undemocratic and archaic Electoral College voting system ... combined to put a moral monster in the White House, the US Congress is getting around to trying him on Impeachment charges. 

This should be a cause for rejoicing. We all know, however, that barring a political miracle, the moribund, regressive and entirely anachronistic US Senate will not muster the two-thirds super-majority required by the Constitution to remove the filth from office. 

Nevertheless we should rejoice in the ignominy of "Impeached!" headlines and the recognition that the current moral midget will bear the stamp of Impeachment on his permanent record throughout history.... hoping always, that is, that American political history continues for at least a little bit longer. 

I celebrated the partial victory of Congress's vote to impeach with a couple of poems, which I am going to reprint here in this blog posting because -- given that (at least for the moment) freedom of speech still exists in this country -- I can.  

In the first of these poems, published earlier this month in NewVerse.News, a journal dedicated to literary responses to public issues, I applied my version of a holiday greeting to a title, 
calling this poem "Seasons Impeaching." The poem is a response to watching the Impeachment hearings, or listening to them on the car radio, or even reading about them in the news coverage -- during, of course, the holiday season. 
Here's the poem. 

Seasons Impeaching

On the third day alone

I begin talking aloud to myself

Or, perhaps, I will eat myself to death

I wake at night

with the word necrosis

in my thoughts

What is it, oh what,

country of my soul

who will you eat yourself out of

given such rot?

Will you smell yourself

dying with putrefaction?

how can anyone be left alone

with their thoughts,

such thoughts,

when the rats nibble

at our toes

and bandits make

for our heart?

The second of these poems was published last weekend by a journal that originates in India, called the Bengaluru Review. Bengaluru is a city of 10 million people located in South India, the heart of that nation's technology industry. 
The review kindly published five of my poems online in its January issue, headlining a web page with the first line from a poem on the national spectacle ("The Hearings") that begins this way: "This is why you hold hearings."
Here's the poem:

The Hearings

This is why you hold hearings.
Anyone who hasn’t noticed what he is yet
gets to see it,
and hear about it
every day.
He condemns himself with his own tongue
making nasty
to one he has already
sought to destroy.

First the knitting,
then the guillotine.



Here is a link to the page with all five poems. Please take a look. 
https://bengalurureview.com/2020/01/18/poems-robert-knox/